Customer support centers, or call centers, are commonly set up by companies and business operations to handle customer inquiries and to provide support for their products and services. A customer support center may be an area on the company's premise with a few persons who handle incoming and outgoing customer calls. For a major telemarketing operation, the support center may be a dedicated facility with a large group of salespersons, advanced computers and telecommunication equipment, where the salespersons make sales calls and receive incoming customer inquiries. A support center may also be a service area that handles customer calls concerning the repair or maintenance of the company's goods or services.
More typically, a customer support center is set up in an open workspace with customer representatives who have access to networked computers, telephones or headsets connected to a telephone switch and supervisor stations. The support center can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a set of technologies called routing servers which work in conjunction with computer telephony integration (CTI). The CTI also interfaces with the customer support servers in addition to an enterprise's e-mail system, databases and web-based services.
Most major business enterprises use customer support centers to interact with their customers. Business applications for the support centers are virtually unlimited in the types of transactions that they can accommodate. They can support, for example, sales, including order entry and reservations; financial services, including funds transfer and stock transactions; and customer services, including technical support, repair and claims handling. Examples of businesses that use support centers include utility companies, mail order firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software products. Some businesses even service internal functions, such as help desks and sales support, through their support centers.
Early customer support centers generally used telephone-based systems for receiving customer calls. Those ranged from a single telephone line to a large multi-node telephone system. A modern support center often has a call management system for the tracking, logging and recording of call details. It may have one operator or many operators, depending on the size of the company. Most support centers today rely on an infrastructure that combines telephone switching networks, the Internet and computers to provide different support functions at various stages of a customer interaction.
In addition, the needs for handling large customer call volumes, improved efficiency and lower cost have forced business enterprises to gradually move away from people intensive service models to more automated technology based models in their support centers. A technology based center typically includes a telephone network interface for receiving incoming customer calls, a routing server to route the calls to the appropriate functions in the center, and CTI software to provide support representatives with information about issues being handled.
Although technology based support centers are less expensive to operate, they suffer a common disadvantage in appearing impersonal to customers, and generally receive lower ratings for customer satisfaction. Customers often prefer to interact with an actual support person when having a product or service problem, rather than responding to voice directions on a telephone or selecting user options on a computer screen.
More advanced support centers have attempted to improve the level of customer attention by employing interactive web applications like instant messaging to provide a more responsive and individual interaction with a customer. Although this is an improvement over traditional telephone recording and computer menu driven customer interfaces, it still lacks the “face-to-face” feeling that most customers prefer when they contact a customer support center.
From the foregoing it is appreciated that there exists a need for a customer support center that augments current practices.